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I wrote about it here before - my girlfriend, Jennifer Reimer, a beautiful and brilliant young woman who was nonetheless plagued by demons, died at 30 years old April 14, 2014.

Last week, I lost another beautiful angel - my grandmother, Dodie, Doris Kildall. I have had to lose two loved ones, from slow motion health decline factors, in less than six months. I'm not apologetic to anyone who feels offended by anything I say or do at this point - they can do it themselves and tell me what I've done wrong.

I said it in my last interview with him - Michael Maiello is one of my best publishing friends. He not only saw me through the hard and good times but also seemed to see something in me nearly from the beginning. Our regular "Open Mikes" Q&A idea was his own and he wanted to switch it up this time - asking me questions! Gosh gee, I didn't even know I had thoughts that anyone would find that interesting. Here goes.....

In Seattle, socialist KshamaSawant has been unusually successful in her progress as city councilwoman. While it will take a good while to apply, she did succeed in pushing $15 minimum wage for the city of Seattle.

The Socialist Alternative movement continued with Jess Spear, who ran a pretty stellar campaign against Frank Chopp for the position of speaker. Nevertheless, Spear was “overwhelmed,” as the Seattle P.I. put it, with Chopp raking it 80 percent of ballots, and the explanations why are pretty storied.

In a recent speech, Pope Francis said bluntly that "our economic system leads to war." In an interview with Michael Maiello that I did for this website, Maiello said in response to one of my questions that "capitalism isn't designed to care and no amount of socially conscious corporate governance or philanthro-capitalism can change that. We picked a system that makes it possible to manage materials but that doesn't meet human emotional needs at all."

Michael Maiello is probably at the top of my list of internet and writing/publishing friends. He is a regular contributor at Dagblog and the author of several books and a comical play about the Iraq war. I have known him for three years now and he has helped me a bit - gotten me published and helped me through some traumatic life events such as my rehabilitation from SSRI antidepressant use and the loss of my fiancé Jennifer Reimer. He did all of this online too! Maiello, like me, is a deep thinker, and through our talks we don't really seek to avoid but rather to inform. This one is short but filled with some very weighty topics that I know are on many minds. Here goes.

This Seattle Pacific shooting is some eerie stuff. Immediately after I heard about it, I told my landlord about it and her response literally was "What the hell?"

Seattle Pacific University is a very quiet, conservative religious university in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle. The university is so quiet and (normally) uneventful that I was pretty unaware of its existence in to my late teen years and my recent trip there was my first real visit there.

The Silk Road might have started as a libertarian experiment, but it was doomed to end as a fiefdom run by pirate kings. The Hidden Wiki holds the keys to a secret internet. To reach it, you need a special browser that can access ‘Tor Hidden Services’ – websites that have chosen to obscure their physical location. Sites such as the Hidden Wiki provide unreliable treasure maps. They publish lists of the special addresses for sites where you can use Bitcoin to buy drugs or stolen credit card numbers, play strange games, or simply talk, perhaps on subjects too delicate for the open web. The lists are often untrustworthy. Sometimes the addresses are out-of-date. Sometimes they are actively deceptive.

The murder of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov: “The investigation is considering several versions,” the statements said. The first it listed was: “a murder as a provocation to destabilize the political situation in the country, where the figure of Nemtsov could have become a sort of sacrificial victim for those who stop at nothing to achieve their political goals.” Putin has said he will "personally oversee" the investigation.

GOP Anti-vaxxer: Rep. Barry Loudermilk, a Georgia Republican.....chair of a key congressional subcommittee on science and technology...responding to a woman who asked whether he'd be looking into...if the (CDC) had covered up information linking vaccines to autism. He responded with a rather unscientific personal anecdote: "I believe it's the parents' decision whether to immunize or not…Most of our children, we didn't immunize. They're healthy."

The culture wars continued: Avijit Roy, whose Mukto-Mona (Free-mind) blog championed liberal secular writing in the Muslim-majority nation, attacked along with his wife in Dhaka...Roy, said to be around 40, is the second Bangladeshi blogger to have been murdered in two years and the fourth writer to have been attacked since 2004. Hardline Islamist groups have long demanded the public execution of atheist bloggers and sought new laws to combat writing critical of Islam....